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From 1950 to 1952, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah airlifted 120-130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel via Iran and Cyprus. By 1968 only 2,000 Jews remained in Iraq. The operation is named after Ezra and Nehemiah, who led the Jewish people from exile in Babylonia to return to Israel in the 5th century BC, as recorded in the books of the Hebrew Bible that bear their names.

IsraCast presents a dramatic and historical audio report (with authentic recordings) of how and why Israel acquired the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights (Israel returned Sinai to Egypt as part of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty of 1979). IsraCast offers this report and recordings to radio stations, educational institutions, and anyone interested in the quest of the Jewish State for independence and self-determination.

Israeli innovations like the Emergency Bandage and the Pocket BVM, a manual ventilator to assist people who are not breathing, are just two of the technologies that are being put to use in saving lives in earthquake-stricken Nepal. According to Israeli paramedic Dov Meisel, speaking to ISRAEL21c from Nepal’s badly-damaged capital, Kathmandu, a number of innovative Israeli technologies have been packed into 60 cases of medical and search-and-rescue equipment arriving at Kathmandu today for his 25-member Israeli disaster response team.

“A lot of our equipment is Israeli-made,” said Meisel, a volunteer with Israel’s United Hatzalah voluntary emergency response network and director of international operations for IsraeLife, an umbrella organization for which he is coordinating a joint disaster response team from United Hatzalah, ZAKA and FIRST rescue and recovery nonprofits.

These are trying times for the Jewish state. First U.S. President Barack Obama offers to give A-Bombs to Iran on a silver platter, and then Russian President Vladimir Putin announces he is now ready to supply Tehran with a sophisticated S-300 air defense to protect them! It took the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee to step in and remind Law Professor Obama about the 'checks and balances' of the U.S. Constitution designed to prevent a president from screwing up on foreign policy. Although the Senate's intervention may have injected a sense of sanity into Obama's dash for a deal with the Ayatollahs, it has not blocked Iran's road to nuclear weapons; it will only make it more difficult and take longer - a detour along the way. At best, if the Iranians do not try and cheat again in the near future, this may be the Iranian game plan according to IDF (ret) Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a leading intelligence expert:

"The Iranians will scrupulously comply during the term of the forthcoming accord and rebuild their economy, bolster their regional status, strengthen their partners Hezbollah and others (Hamas, Houthi rebels in Yemen), deepen their nuclear research; and when the accord expires they will return to their nuclear weapons program with greater intensity."

Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, the two deans of U.S. foreign policy, have gutted President Barack Obama's nuclear understandings with Iran. In a devastating critique in the Wall Street Journal, the two professors give Obama an 'F' in foreign policy. Chapter and verse, they dissected clause after clause of the accord hammered out by Secretary of State John Kerry and the other members of the P5+1 and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Lausanne. When Shultz and Kissinger were finished, Obama and Kerry looked like rank amateurs in coping with the Iranians:

"Iran has gradually turned the negotiations on its head – the West has felt the need to break every deadlock with a new proposal."

'The devil will be in the details' - Iran appears to have made some surprising nuclear concessions in the framework understandings in Lausanne but will they start backtracking when the fine print is negotiated by the end of June? The jury is still out. Although Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was beaming from ear to ear was he playing his designated role in another Iranian scheme to again pull the wool over the eyes of the world? Was it another old Iranian scam of one foot forward and then two steps back in the upcoming and binding round of talks to be finalized by the end of June? This is the big question that Israel will be watching in the months ahead. And with good reason; if Iran, a known con artist which has lied and cheated repeatedly in the past, still insists that its entire nuclear project has always been for peaceful purposes, then 'buyer beware!'

Heart disease is a well-known killer. Just one decade ago, the WHO (World Health Organization) released its findings showing that heart disease has become a global epidemic with approximately 17 million people dying each year from heart attack and stroke; at the time of publishing, this made up nearly one-third of deaths globally; and the WHO then prospected that this number would only rise with time. Thankfully, medical research has produced some significant advances to combat this medical threat and continues to develop innovative methods to treat and prevent heart disease. Not surprisingly, a number of these advances (and ongoing research) are coming from none other than Israel. IsraCast went to Shaare Zedek Medical Hospital to learn more.

The flashpoint between Shiite and Sunni Islam has erupted in Yemen. After Shiite Iran armed Houthi rebels to the hilt, they have ousted the Sunni regime of Sunni President Abd Mansour Hadi. Neighboring Saudi Arabia has had enough. The Sunni regime in Riyadh has launched a major offensive into Yemen with 100 aircraft and an estimated 150,000 troops. Egypt has also dispatched troops, ships and aircraft to fight against the Shiite rebels in Yemen.

With the eyes and ears of the world focused on the U.S. Congress, Bibi Netanyahu railed at America's impending nuclear deal with Iran - Barack Obama was not impressed. The U.S. President said there was 'nothing new' in the Israel's leader's warning:

"We don't yet have a deal. But if we are successful, this will be the best deal possible with Iran to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon... On the core issue, which is how do we prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would make it far more dangerous and would give it scope for even greater action in the region, the prime minister didn't offer any viable alternatives."

The fanatical Revolutionary Guards put on the show to reveal who is really calling the shots in Tehran. There is no way they are going to accept the dismantling of the nuclear weapons program. This, in the midst of the current nuclear talks in which President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and National Security Adviser Rice are turning over backwards trying to sell a nuclear deal - one that will enable the Ayatollahs to keep their uranium enrichment capability, and who knows what else, while the sanctions are gradually lifted. Then after a period of so many years the international inspection will expire. In other words, it opens this nuclear spectre: the Iranians are to act nice and later, if they haven't done so in the meantime, exploit their capability to 'break out' for nuclear weapons. It boils down to acquiring A-bombs on the installment plan! But after the 'Hollywood' sea pageant, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif must have hit the roof. For months now they have been hard at work smiling their way to closing the deal.

Do Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence services know something we don't? Otherwise it is hard to explain why the Israeli leader is jeopardizing his already strained relations with Obama, who still has some two years in office to run America's foreign policy. On the face of it, it appears to be a rash and reckless gambit for Netanyahu to put all his eggs in the basket of the Republican majority in Congress. Moreover in the current Israeli election campaign, Netanyahu has left himself open to charges that he is harming Israel's crucial relations with America in order to boost his popularity with the Right wing.

It's no longer a war with a radical organization. It's something else. Something the human mind finds difficult to deal with. There are wars. There is brutality against rivals and enemies. There are exceptions in every war. But when it comes to jihad, horror is a norm. Slaughtering a person in front of the cameras appeared to be the lowest point. We were wrong. The burning of the Jordanian pilot clarifies that we are witnessing something much darker. Pure evil that is turned into a snuff film.

Egypt is in the midst of a war that can be categorized as a low-intensity conflict. This category represents a common pattern of military campaigns in the early twenty-first century: sub-conventional wars fought by armies and security services belonging to states against armies of terrorilla- fully armed and hierarchical organizations that operate among civilian populations, combining guerilla and terror warfare tactics with the logic of terrorism. The civilians provide shelter and aid, whether under duress or in solidarity, and they always suffer the bitter consequences of the conflict.

What do Jimmy Carter, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and BBC reporters have in common? Either they don't like, or in fact hate Israel. Look at their recent comments on the cause of the recent Muslim terror attacks in Paris:

When Jon Stewart asked Carter if religion played a role in the Paris atrocities, Carter replied:

'One of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem, and this aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza - what they're doing now - what's being done to them. So I think that's part of it'.

France is reeling and trying to come to grips with an Islamist terror attack that has rocked it to its very core. The cold-blooded killers who shot dead two policemen and then systematically executed the ten caricaturists and editors of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly not only committed a massacre, but also dealt a severe blow to the very foundations of the French republic. It would appear to be on a lesser scale of the '9/11' atrocity that shocked America and the world more than thirteen years ago. The writing was on the wall, written in blood, for President Francois Hollande and the French government, after French Jihadists repeatedly attacked Jews in France and Brussels. However these were passed off as isolated incidents or carried out by 'deranged' individuals. But now the Jihadists have perpetrated a carefully planned slaughter that has wiped out a French magazine because it dared to lampoon the prophet Mohammed. In fleeing the scene, one of the killers casually walked up to a wounded policeman lying on the sidewalk and calmly shot him in the head. He then walked to the get away car and shouted:

According to the Associated Press, the ISIL assault was launched by a suicide bomber driving an armored vehicle across the Turkish border:

"Beirut (AP): The Islamic State group launched an attack on the Syrian border town of Kobani - a first in the ongoing siege, a Kurdish official and activist said."

He was identified as Nawaf Khalil a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic party. In Khalil's words:

"ISIL used to attack the town (of Kobani) from three sides. Today they are attacking from four sides."

There is no question that ISIL could not have launched the attack from across the Turkish border without the green light from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish Army has deployed a cordon of tanks along its border with Syria to bar Turkish volunteers from reaching Kobani, which has been under ISIL attack since September.

"If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea." This statement was made by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, about a month and a half after the declaration of the independence, and with the Egyptian Army already having invaded the territory allotted to the Jewish state. The Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, explained in his memoirs: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world."

And the Arab League at the time also adopted two decisions, which materialized into a bill designed to seize the bank accounts of Jews and strip them of their possessions – a bill that was subsequently put into practice among well-established and wealthy Jewish communities in places such as Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Entire communities were destroyed.

This was the message from Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, after two Palestinian terrorists, armed with a handgun and meat cleaver, ran into a Jerusalem synagogue and hacked and shot four Jewish worshippers to death and wounded eight other Israelis. This is what happened:

At approximately 7:AM, Jewish worshippers were in the middle of the early morning prayer of Shaharit at the Tehilat Yaakov synagogue in the religious neighborhood of Har Nof, when two young Palestinians drove up in their car, parked it nearby, and then ran unhindered into the synagogue. (Most public buildings in Israel have armed guards at the entrance but synagogues do not - no one thought that Palestinians would stoop to executing terror attacks on holy sites.) They immediately began shooting and hacking at the unsuspecting worshippers, who were already wrapped in their prayer shawls. Eyewitnesses later described how the killers moved from one victim to another, one terrorist was firing all the time, and the other was hacking victims with his big meat cleaver. All the while they were shouting 'Allah Akbar!'

While there was sporadic Palestinian rioting elsewhere, U.S. Secretary John Kerry's mission to Amman has succeeded so far in dousing the flames that threatened to ignite a third Palestinian intifada (uprising). Credit where credit is due, and this time hats off to Kerry. Meeting first with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and then together with Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Jordan's King Abdullah, Secretary Kerry was able to persuade the sides to take 'constructive steps, real steps, not rhetoric to de-escalate the situation'.

Above and beyond the startling headlines about a senior Obama official calling Netanyahu "chickenshit", there is the far more important revelation by reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in his latest expose in the Atlantic magazine. A second senior Obama official agreed Netanyahu was a chickenshit not only in the Palestinian peace process, but also on the Iranian nuclear threat:

"The Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. It's too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately, he couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger - it was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it's too late."